Asrock X99X Killer - SATA Ports

Before I show my testing results, which we can decide if it has any significance, I noticed something in an earlier post of yours. That is:

"All drive SATA connections are from the motherboard ports to their corresponding hotswap bay connectors...".

Hot swap bay connectors set off a red flag, please explain what the hotswap bays are. Part of a PC case? An add on piece of hardware? Hotswap bays are known trouble makers. Do you know if they are "active", meaning powered due to their own circuitry, or purely passive, unpowered? I'm aware of hot swap bays that won't allow some drives to operate at all.

Since the Z87 chipset, Intel has adopted some of the SATA 3.1 protocols, which leaves some drives behind, as their controllers are not compatible with those protocols. This includes some SSDs with early SSD controllers. That may also affect some of your drives.

The closest SSD I have to DevillEars' Samsung is my Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD. This is the 840 Evo on the SSATA_0 port:



That is a normal result for an 840 EVO, with the CPU idling, so a non-tweaked benchmark result.

Since the result seemed normal, but I was only testing one drive, I ran three instances of AS SSD at the same time, two for drives on the SATA_0 - 5 ports, and the 840 EVO still on the SSATA_0 port. The is the result for the 840 EVO:



Yes, the results are slightly better. That was caused by the load of three instances of AS SSD taking at least one core of the CPU out of its idle, low clock speed, as well as the core not being in a C State power saving state. This benchmark and SATA IO in general is not CPU intensive, at least for high performance processors.

Just for comparison, the SanDisk OS SSD I posted the benchmark for previously took the greatest performance hit, but that was due to it serving as the OS drive with more work to do:



I'm really wondering what your configuration of drives and other hardware really is, which is important to know and may be related to your issues.

The following is from the Intel® C610 Series Chipset and Intel® X99 Chipset Platform Controller Hub (PCH) datasheet:

Serial ATA (SATA) Controller

The PCH has three integrated SATA host controllers that support independent DMA operation on up to total ten ports and supports data transfer rates of up to 6.0 Gb/s on all ports. The SATA controller contains two modes of operation?”a legacy mode using I/O space, and an AHCI mode using memory space. Software that uses legacy mode will not have AHCI capabilities. The PCH supports the Serial ATA Specification, Revision 3.0. The PCH also supports several optional sections of the Serial ATA II: Extensions to Serial ATA 1.0 Specification, Revision 1.0 (AHCI support is required for some elements).

That does not seem to be an on-die SATA hub, or a kludge.

Link to this datasheet: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/x99-chipset-pch-datasheet.html

IF it turns out the SATA ports on the X99 chipset are the limiting factor, a true workstation board with the C610 chipset (enterprise version of the X99) may be a better choice for your requirements.

SATA performance "cause" determined and issue resolved!

Edited by DevillEars - 01 Aug 2015 at 11:12pm

Storage - 10 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and Intel® Rapid Storage 13), NCQ, AHCI, Hot Plug and ASRock HDD Saver Technology - 1 x eSATA Connector, supports NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug - 1 x Ultra M.2 Socket, supports M Key M.2 SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module and M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s) *SSATA3_3 connector is shared with the eSATA port, SSATA3_2 connector is shared with Ultra M.2 Socket **RAID is supported on SATA3_0 ~ SATA3_5 ports only.

From the product spec sheet. So yes, it supports all SATA standards.
As for HDD brands, I would recommend Western Digital (WD), black, blue or green
depending on your budget and requirements. I have had nothing but bad luck with
Seagate for many years now.